Czechoslovakian Expose Redux
The series that will never die. (My favorite installment is still this one.) For those just tuning in, I find these covers by spending hours browsing online Czech and Slovak…
Features & Reviews
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The Rumpus Interview with David Goodwillie and Teddy Wayne
Two debut novels addressing – amongst other topics ripped from the Zeitgeist – the symbiotic relationship between terrorism and the media, appear this month in bookstores:
The Next Big Hit
Literary magazines, once the backbone, the pulse, and other anatomically analogous words of the American fiction world, have taken a hit in subscriptions in recent decades. Does this mean the…
“I don’t remember my first kiss.”
“Page after page, Bobcat Country stirs both the counter-intuitively satisfying ‘Should I be reading this?’ queasiness of the Confessional poetry of Berryman, Sexton, and Snodgrass, and the unsettlingly provocative “Is…
Bobcat Country
Page after page, Bobcat Country stirs both the counter-intuitively satisfying “Should I be reading this?” queasiness of the Confessional poetry of Berryman, Sexton, and Snodgrass, and the unsettlingly provocative “Is…
Books Behind Bars
“Another day of volunteering at Rikers Island with the NYPL has come to a close. Thursday I went to one of the male detention houses along with my mentor and two other staff members…
Kipling on Clemens
Mark Twain died one hundred years ago on this date, so you’ll have to forgive us for mentioning the great author twice in one day. The Library of America has…
Anonymous Attacks
“An extraordinary literary ‘whodunnit’ over the identity of a mystery reviewer who savaged works by some of Britain’s leading academics on the Amazon website has culminated in a top historian…
“A writing-life is not a life.”
“In the immediate days following Ray’s death, I did not teach. Colleagues urged that I take more time off, even the entire semester, but I was eager to return to…
Mark Twain, Literary Critic
“He was less well-known, but no less talented, as a literary critic. Proof of it has resided, mostly unnoticed, in a small library in Redding, Conn., where hundreds of his…
The Baffler 2.0
Can a resuscitated left-wing publication—a print publication!—thrive in the hostile economic conditions of 2010? The editors of The Baffler are betting it can.
“The pain, confusion, absurdity, and humor of grief…”
“How and what we tell ourselves about our lives matters. The words we choose matter, and how we shape the story matters.” Grace Talusan reviews Katherine Shonk’s debut novel, Happy…